|AN auctioneer's catalogue--and particularly an auctioneer's catalogue
more than a hundred years old--is not, at first sight, the most
suggestive of subjects. And yet that issued in July, 1774, by Mr. Good,
of 121 Fleet Street, still possesses considerable interest. For it
is nothing less than an account, bald, indeed, and only moderately
literary, of the 'Household [sic] Furniture, with the Select Collection
of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek,
French, Italian and other Languages, late the Library of Dr. Goldsmith,
Deceased.' As one runs over the items, one seems to realize the
circumstances. One seems almost to see Mr. Good's unemotional
assistants, with their pens behind their ears, and their ink-bottles
'upon the excise principle' dangling from their button-holes, as they
peer about the dingy Chambers at Brick Court, with the dark little
closet of a bedroom at the back where the poor Doctor lay and died.
We can imagine them sniffing superciliously at the chief pictorial
adornment, 'The Tragic Muse, in a gold frame;' or drawing from its
sheath, with an air of 'prentice connoisseurship, 'the steel-hilted
sword, inlaid with gold,' or 'the black-hilted _ditto_,' not without
speculations as to how those weapons would adorn their own ungainly
persons in a holiday jaunt to White Conduit House or Marybone Gardens.
We see them professionally prodding the faded mahogany sofa 'covered
with blue morine' which had so often vibrated under the nervous
twitchings of Johnson; appraising the 'compass card-tables' over which
Boswell had dealt trumps to Reynolds; or critically weighing the teapot
in which the 'Jessamy Bride' had more than once made tea. Their sordid
commercial figures must have crossed and re-crossed before 'the very
large dressing-glass' with 'mahogany frame,' which only a few weeks
past had reflected the 'blue velvet,' and the 'straw-coloured' and
'silver-grey tamboured waistcoats' for which honest Mr. William Filby,
at the sign of the Harrow in Water Lane, was never now to see the money.
No doubt, too, they desecrated, with their Fleet Street mud, that famous
Wilton carpet which had looked so sumptuous when it was first laid down
but half-a-dozen years ago; and, if they were at all like their brethren
of these days, they must have pished generally over the rest of those
modest properties which, in the golden epoch when the 'Good Natur'd
Man' seemed to promise perpetual prosperity, had excited so much awe and
admiration among Goldsmith's humbler friends. 'Not much to tot up here,
Docket!'--says Mr. Good's young man to his fellow. And we may fancy
Mr. Docket assenting with a contemptuous extension of his under lip,
enforced by the supplementary proposition that they should at once
moisten their unpromising labours by adjourning to a pot of 'Parsons'
Black Champagne' at the Tavern by the Temple Gates.
As for the books, the 'Select Collection' that the unsympathetic
stock-takers turned over so irreverently with their feet as they lay
in dusty ranges on the floor, it must be feared that worthy Mr. Good's
description of them as 'Scarce, Curious and Valuable' is more creditable
to his business traditions than his literary insight. Goldsmith was
scarcely a book-lover in the sense in which that term is now used. The
man who, as Hawkins relates, could tear half-a-dozen leaves out of
a volume to save himself the trouble of transcription,--the man who
underscored objectionable passages with his thumb-nail, as he once did
to a new poem that belonged to Reynolds--was _not_ a genuine _amateur
du livre_. They were a 'speculative lot' in all probability, the 'Brick
Court Library;' and no doubt bore about them visibly the bumps and
bruises of their transit 'in two returned post chaises' to the remote
farm at Hyde, where their owner laboured at his vast 'Animated
Nature.' Many of them had manifestly been collected to that end.
Hill's 'Fossils,' 1748; Pliny's 'Historia Naturalis,' 1752; Gessner and
Aldrovandus 'De Quadrupedibus;' Gouan's 'Histoire des Poissons,' 1770;
Bohadsch's 'De Animalibus Marinis,' 1761; De Geer's 'Histoire des
Insectes,' 1771, must all plainly have belonged to that series of
purchases for the nonce which, he says in his preface, had so severely
taxed his overburdened resources. In the classics he was fairly well
equipped; and, as might be expected, he had many of the British poets,
not to mention two copies of that indispensable manual, Mr. Edward
Bysshe his treatise of the rhyming art.
But it is in French literature generally, and in French minstrels
and playwrights in particular, that his store is richest. He has the
'Encyclopédie,' the 'Dictionnaire' and 'Recueil d'Anecdotes,' the
'Dictionnaire Littéraire,' the 'Dictionnaire Critique, Pittoresque
et Sentencieux,' the 'Dictionnaire Gentilhomme;' he has many of the
_ana_--'Parrhasiana,' 'Ducatiana,' 'Nau-deana,' 'Patiniana,' although,
oddly enough, there is no copy of the 'Ménagiana,' which not only
supplied him with that ancient ballad of 'Monsieur de la Palice' out of
which grew 'Madam Blaize,' but also with the little poem of Bernard de
la Monnoye, which he paraphrased so brightly in the well-known stanzas
beginning:=
````'Say, cruel Iris, pretty rake,
`````Dear mercenary beauty,
````What annual offering shall I make,
`````Expressive of my duty?'=
He has the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Fontenelle, Marmontel, Voiture;
he has the plays of Brueys, La Chaussée, Dancourt, Destouches; he has
many of the madrigalists and minor verse-men,--all of which possessions
tend to corroborate that suspected close study of Gallic authors
from which, as many hold, he derived not a little of the unfailing
perspicuity of his prose, and most of the brightness and vivacity of his
more familiar verse. Of his own works--and the fact is curious when one
remembers some of his traditional characteristics--there are
practically no examples, at least there is none catalogued. Their sole
representative is an imperfect set of the 'History of the Earth and
Animated Nature,' which had only recently been completed, and was
published posthumously. Not a single copy of 'The Vicar,' of 'She Stoops
to Conquer,' of 'The Citizen of the World,' of 'The Deserted Village'!
Not even a copy of that rarest of rarities, the privately printed
version of 'Edwin and Angelina,' which its author told his friend
Cradock 'could not be amended'--although he was always amending it! Of
course it is possible that his own writings had been withdrawn from
Mr. Good's catalogue, or that they are included in the 'and others' of
unspecified lots. But this is scarcely likely, and it may be accepted
as a noteworthy fact that one of the most popular authors of his day
did not, at his death, possess any of his own performances, with the
exception of an incomplete specimen of his most laborious compilation.*
* Racine was in similar case. In the inventory of his
effects, discovered some time since, there is not a single
copy of his works.
Besides this, the only volumes that bear indirectly upon his work are
the 'Memoirs' of the Cardinal de Retz, which he had used in 'The Bee,'
the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, which perhaps prompted 'The
Citizen of the World,' and the 'Roman Comique' of M. Paul Scarron, which
he had been translating in the latter months of its life--an accident
which has left its mark in his last poem, the admirable 'Retaliation':=
```'Of old, when Scarron his companions invited,
``Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united.'=
It may be that he had intended to prefix a biographical sketch or memoir
to his version of the 'Comic Romance,' since the reference here
is plainly to those famous picnic suppers in the Marais, to which,
according to Scarron's biographer, M. Charles Baumet, came as
guests--but * '_chacun apportant son plat_'--the pink of dames, of
courtiers, and of men of letters.
Where did they go, these books and household goods of 'Dr. Goldsmith,
deceased'? It is to be presumed that he did not boast a book-plate,
for none, to our knowledge, has ever been advertised, nor is there any
record of one in the late Lord de Tabley's well-known 'Handbook,' so
that the existing possessors of those precious volumes, in the absence
of any autograph inscription, must entertain their treasures unawares.
Of his miscellaneous belongings, the only specimens now well-known do
not seem to have passed under the hammer of the Fleet Street auctioneer.
His favourite chair, a dark, hollow-seated, and somewhat penitential
looking piece of furniture, is preserved at South Kensington, where, not
many years since, it was sketched, in company with his cane--perhaps
the very cane that once crossed the back of Evans the bookseller--by Mr.
Hugh Thomson, the clever young Irish artist to whom we are indebted for
the most successful of recent illustrated editions of the | Vicar of
Wakefield.' *
* Published by Macmillan in 1890. The sketch forms the tail-
piece to the Preface, p. xxi.
Neither chair nor cane is in the Good Catalogue, nor does it make any
mention of the worn old wooden writing-desk which was presented to Sir
Henry Cole's museum by Lady Hawes. Her husband, Sir Benjamin Hawes, once
Under Secretary at War, was the grandson of William Hawes, the 'surgeon
apothecary' in the Strand, who was called in, late on that Friday night
in March, when the poor Doctor was first stricken down with the illness
which a few days later terminated fatally. William Hawes, a worthy and
an able man, who subsequently obtained a physician's degree, and helped
to found the Humane Society, was the author of the little pamphlet, now
daily growing rarer, entitled 'An Account of the late Dr. Goldsmith's
Illness, so far as relates to the Exhibition of Dr. James's Powders,
etc., 1774' [April]. He dedicated it to Burke and Reynolds; and
he published it (he says) partly to satisfy curiosity as to the
circumstances of Goldsmith's death, partly to vindicate his own
professional conduct in the matter. His narrative, in which discussion
of the popular nostrum upon which Goldsmith so obstinately relied
not unnaturally occupies a considerable part, is too familiar for
repetition; and his remarks on Goldsmith as a writer are of the
sign-post order. But his personal testimony to the character of 'his
late respected and ingenious friend' may fitly close this paper: 'His
[Goldsmith's] humanity and generosity greatly exceeded the narrow limits
of his fortune; and those who were no judges of the literary merit of
the Author, could not but love the Man for that benevolence by which he
was so strongly characterized.'